The Bald-Headed Girl in Sicily

The Bald-Headed Girl in Sicily is a minor but indelible figure in Joseph Heller's Catch-22, a prostitute whose shaved head becomes for Yossarian a haunting emblem of the war's casual, grotesque cruelty and the vulnerability of women caught in its wake. She appears during a rest-leave trip to Sicily that Yossarian and Orr undertake with Milo Minderbinder, ostensibly to buy eggs but actually to pursue Milo's ever-expanding syndicate operations. The girl is one of two prostitutes—both described as oily, obese, and in their late twenties despite being presented as twelve-year-old virgins—procured by a scheming ten-year-old pimp. The encounter is sordid and exhausting: Yossarian and Orr are jammed into the same double bed with the two women, who keep waking them up to ask them to switch partners. The bald-headed girl wears a beige turban throughout the night, and Yossarian's perceptions are so fuzzy that he pays it no notice until the next morning, when the pimp snatches it off in a public square, exposing her shocking, misshapen, and completely denuded skull. Vengeful neighbors had shaved her hair to the gleaming bone because she had slept with Germans. The girl screeches in feminine outrage and waddles comically after the pimp, her grisly, bleak, violated scalp slithering up and down ludicrously around the queer darkened wart of her face like something bleached and obscene. Yossarian has never laid eyes on anything so bare before. The pimp spins the turban high on his finger like a trophy, keeping himself skipping inches ahead of her fingertips as he leads her in a tantalizing circle around the square, which is congested with people howling with laughter and pointing to Yossarian with derision. Milo, arriving with a grim look of haste, puckers his lips reprovingly at the unseemly spectacle of so much vice and frivolity and insists on leaving at once for Malta. The girl's humiliation is public, theatrical, and utterly without remedy; she is left exposed in the brilliant Sicilian daylight, her punishment for collaboration made a spectacle for the amusement of the crowd. Yossarian does not intervene, and the incident is quickly swallowed by the relentless forward motion of Milo's commercial errands. Yet the image persists. Later, back on Pianosa, when Orr teases Yossarian about the girl—"How could you do it to a girl with no hair?"—Yossarian admits he had no idea she was bald. Orr, with characteristic slyness, claims he knew all along. The exchange reveals that Yossarian, even in the midst of the squalid encounter, was oblivious to the full extent of the girl's degradation. The bald-headed girl is not merely a grotesque anecdote; she is a precursor to the novel's deeper meditations on the body's vulnerability and the way war reduces people to matter. Her shaved head, a mark of punishment and shame, prefigures Snowden's spilled entrails and the soldier in white's hollow bandages. She is one of the many "poor and stupid and diseased people" Yossarian has seen in Italy, Egypt, and North Africa, and she contributes to his growing sense of a world in which suffering is random, punishment is arbitrary, and the innocent—especially women and children—are the most exposed. Yossarian later recalls her with a mixture of pity, tenderness, and regret, even as he acknowledges that she still evokes in him strong sensations. She is, in her way, a ghost that haunts the margins of the novel, a reminder that the war's violence is not confined to the battlefield but extends into the bodies and lives of those who are merely trying to survive.